Author
Topic: Death, mostly death, but also life. (Read 1114 times)

Most people don't know about the things that go on above and below the exhibits of El Museo. Out of sight of schoolchildren and families is a whole different side to the museum's life, a life that's responsible for the public areas even being there (though the directors would like to think otherwise). A life, ironically, of death.

In the partially darkened upper and lower crypts the corpses are kept in long cabinets and shelving. Millions are impaled on iron pins, skinned and mummified, or drowned and pickled in Very Near Everclear (food grade, even). The air smells strongly of moth ball pesticides, and faintly of other solvents. This is a tomb, a catacomb, a morgue. And yet, the atmosphere is nothing if not cheery. The curators sit as grim reapers, collaborating with the collection managers to the sisyphian task of bringing order out of unending chaos. There are always new bodies coming in, we would have it no other way. More bodies means more study, but also more work. This is no funeral; the biologist undertakers are lovers of life and that's /why/ they are in this line of work. A thousand questions could be answered by just one of the specimens, studied under the right light, carefully enough. Each one is like a record in a government archive, well, that is if every record was an encyclopedia onto itself.

The reaping is a somewhat sad operation, but the Guardians of Natural History live with their guilt by trying to make amends. It may be thirty, 100, hundreds of years before someone retrieves a particular drawer for study, but they're meant to last. The preserved individuals, protected from mold, insects and climate, would last unto fossilization under these conditions. All this information, once lost, would never be regained. And it sustains the life of El Museo, like a great benevolent beast who eats the dead to bring forth new growth.

Logged

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia DissectionGrand Visser of the Six Legged ClassChanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish

"My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know, everybody you see, everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement."

Hi there, Speaking of death prediction, I find it really odd that one of the on-line death prediction services showed me the same death date that I was foretold in my dream about a year ago. http://yourdeathdate.info/1/index.html - I can’t explain this coincidence in any other way except that there must be some kind of magic involved here.

Hi there, Speaking of death prediction, I find it really odd that one of the on-line death prediction services showed me the same death date that I was foretold in my dream about a year ago. http://yourdeathdate.info/1/index.html - I can’t explain this coincidence in any other way except that there must be some kind of magic involved here.

Why no, we weren't speaking of death prediction. Would you happen to be a clever spambot?

Hi there, Speaking of death prediction, I find it really odd that one of the on-line death prediction services showed me the same death date that I was foretold in my dream about a year ago. http://yourdeathdate.info/1/index.html - I can’t explain this coincidence in any other way except that there must be some kind of magic involved here.

Hi there, Speaking of death prediction, I find it really odd that one of the on-line death prediction services showed me the same death date that I was foretold in my dream about a year ago. http://yourdeathdate.info/1/index.html - I can’t explain this coincidence in any other way except that there must be some kind of magic involved here.

Why no, we weren't speaking of death prediction. Would you happen to be a clever spambot?

I guess I underestimate how creepy my field of work happens to be. We worship life but deal in death, strange but true. Like doctors who train on cadavers or dead dogs. It seems normal to me. I've killed millions of insects in my life, but I've never enjoyed killing.

Logged

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia DissectionGrand Visser of the Six Legged ClassChanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish

Hi there, Speaking of death prediction, I find it really odd that one of the on-line death prediction services showed me the same death date that I was foretold in my dream about a year ago. http://yourdeathdate.info/1/index.html - I can’t explain this coincidence in any other way except that there must be some kind of magic involved here.

Why no, we weren't speaking of death prediction. Would you happen to be a clever spambot?

I'll give him one more post, and then we'll see.

Don't bother, I've seen spambots post the same message on another forum.Kai, this was quite nice.

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Formerly known as the Space Pope (then I was excommunicated), Father Kurt Christ (I was deemed unfit to raise children, spiritual or otherwise), and Vartox (the speedo was starting to chafe)

Hi there, Speaking of death prediction, I find it really odd that one of the on-line death prediction services showed me the same death date that I was foretold in my dream about a year ago. http://yourdeathdate.info/1/index.html - I can’t explain this coincidence in any other way except that there must be some kind of magic involved here.

Why no, we weren't speaking of death prediction. Would you happen to be a clever spambot?

Really unsettling imagery, Kai. Death, frozen in time, yet it's part of the living pulse of El Museo.

What is really weird for me, is that it seems unsettling for everyone else. Here I am, working in a room with a half a million or more dead organisms stuck with pins into styrofoam and lined up in drawers in cabinets with neat little labels,

And it seems like the most normal thing in the world.

You have to remember, though, I grew up with this. My parents collected insects, and I've had display cases filled with dried dead moths, beetles and dragonflies in my room since before I can remember. There was never any horror in it, just like a slaughterman doesn't horror at butchering his hogs. He's done it so long, and his father and his father, that its natural. And it /is/, it's not like humans don't kill things for food. Pretty much every living thing does in some way. This isn't killing for food, but it's not for vanity either. Nor is it just some OCD urge to collect (though I hear many amateurs have this). It's more like the painter who takes a piece of art, once live on the tool of a great artist, now static and unmoving, and hangs it somewhere to look upon so he can learn from it. And if El Museo is just the collective urges of 500 people doing this all together, well, to some it looks unsettling. To us, it's normal.

Logged

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia DissectionGrand Visser of the Six Legged ClassChanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish